APEX Capabilities

Engineering

Over the past decade, the U.S. has seen revolutionary advancements in data generation and capturing technologies. These advancements have exponential increased in the overall variety, volume, and veracity of data. Not surprisingly, such increases have also led to significant processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) challenges for analysts attempting to exploit this information in real-time.

APEX Engineering Solutions specializes in researching, rapidly prototyping, and productizing innovative analytic solutions. APEX Engineering Solutions researches and develops the technical means to address a growing problem within the analytical community: today’s ISR data is overwhelming analytical systems to analysts and operators who must draw conclusions from them. By combining skilled engineers and developers with experienced ISR analysts, APEX Engineering Solutions is able to identify capability shortfalls and rapidly create tailored solutions with direct feedback from operators. Solutions taken from concept to deployment have included:

Exploitation Pipelines

APEX develops custom entity extraction pipelines for collation of geospatial data points from structured and unstructured text reporting. These pipelines, which include software as well as analysis workflows, enable geospatial discovery of critical contextual intelligence. APEX also provides raster indexing and processing pipelines to facilitate LiDAR content discovery for disadvantaged users operating in low bandwidth environments. With these capabilities, analysts and operators are able to clip out only the content they need through intuitive web based geo-processors.

Distributed Computing

APEX develops big data distributed processing systems. Guiding design principles are 1) provide analysts with a single point of entry to multiple real-time and historical data sources, 2) bring data and results to the analyst through alert services, 3) scale for increasing processing needs, 4) move processing from client machines to servers, and 5) leverage open source when possible.

Open Source

Open source software provides the flexibility to meet big data requirements while reducing technology costs. Specifically, open source technology and data are abundant within the GIS solution space. Solutions from Boundless (OpenGeo Suite), Apache (Hadoop, Accumulo), and Open Street Map are all enabling GIS solutions to move away from proprietary components. These solutions will only mature as adoption across the government becomes widespread.